The clay banks of the Reed Sea are almost
flesh. Indeed, some shorelines are as coral pink as blush. Gently bathed in the morning
tide, the afternoon shore bubbles and winkles today as in the Second Millennium. By day
the white ibis digs for water bugs in the mud quaggy enough to trap a crocodile or swallow
a man, while in the shallows, snakes snag and devour the silver and green fish that make
their houses under rushes of papyri. At night the purple sky still arches like a smooth
speckled canopy, the virtual god on all fours over a sleeping lover.

Hamilton Beck did as he bad done for nearly three weeks.
Before the others woke, he put on his khaki walking shorts and linen shirt, covered his
head with a wide-brimmed Stetson, and climbed with pilgrim resolution the cliffs that
still sheltered their camp with maw shadow. For protection against vipers he carried a
Tyrolian walking stick he had purchased in Oberammergau. Against the failures of his life,
ameliorated only by a momentary parting he had made in the sea of scholarship, he carried
a Masoretic text of the Old Testament. "0 Lord, the clay of the earth which Thou hast
formed calls up to Thee. 0 Lord, I who am not worthy...."

Meanwhile, those who had come with him were in their tents
sleeping under bug nets or already making the morning coffee with mineral water imported
from France.

Professor Hamilton Beck had for a number of years been
sitting on the laurels of a distinguished series of publications. His analysis of Linear B
tablets from Knossos had reopened a long-moribund avenue of scholarship into the ciphering
of early Minoan manuscripts. But this was not enough. His later discovery of and report on
the tomb of Philip of Macedonia had represented the first contribution by any non-Soviet
to the prestigious Journal of the Academy of Russian Archaeology. But the pinnacle
of his success, thus far, had come with his discovery at Masada of the esoteric Temple
Scroll, which exposed for the first time to modem and secular eyes the sacred rituals of
the radical priests of Zadok.

Then there was a hiatus of some years during which
archaeological circles waited anxiously for some word or rumor of )me Beck's next
achievement. That he had declined invitations to chair various conferences, that he even
refused interviews in the Chicago Review of Oriental Studies only fed the
speculation that he was on to something big. His second divorce in as many years was the
regrettable evidence of his all-consuming project at hand. Then nine that years went by.
The world of biblical scholarship no longer waited sky for Professor Beck. Man's time is
not God's time.

all 'I hate to cast suspicion on any race, Doctor Beck,"
Amos Spelling confided to him upon his return to the camp, 'but we may very well reed to
get a new diving crew. These Egyptians . . he said, glancing about him to insure their
confidentiality, "aren't really with us if you get my drift. . . ." Beck always
listened to Spelling only because it had been Spelling's support that had made the
financing of the project possible.

Beck nodded politely. "I hadn't
considered that, but you might have something there. But how can we get someone else-this
being a restricted military zone and all?" Spelling didn't know either, but he knew
that there was a small American contingent-a peacekeeping force stationed farther down in
the gulf, somewhere along the banks of the Red Sea to which the Reed Sea, or Gulf of Suez
as it is modernly called, was merely a finger lake. Almost a month and no results from
their divings, Beck was beginning to get a little nervous too, but he had not yet begun to
look for conspiracies set against him.

"But your daughter will be joining us
soon, right?"

Beck had forgotten. Yes, his first-born was
arriving-today? Tomorrow?--Beck had lost track of time 'in the endless desert, beside the
timeless waters,' but what Spelling wanted Beck's wandering mind to understand was that
they needed an entirely new crew. "Yes, yes, of course." Beck knew Moslems held
nothing against Moses Moslems accepted the Five Books of Moses and would have nothing
against establishing their validity with archaeological evidence. What Beck was not sure
about was if he wanted his daughter diving with these sons of Ishmael.

"Even so, Amos," Beck said
defensively, "one diver among seven certainly wouldn't discover anything if the
others were dead set against it." He had seen the shoddy Egyptian diving gear, the
second-hand Soviet equipment, the way they left their gear in the sun to rot.

The Beck expedition consisted of Beck, Amos
Spelling-the Dean of the College of Religious Study at the Kansas Baptist Institute which
funded the endeavor-Spellings prematurely fat wife Jerusha, three anthropology or seminary
students from KBI, six divers supplied by the Egyptian Ministry of Archaeological Study,
and nine support personnel-cooks, drivers, boatmen, and mechanics, all still in uniform to
the resurrected Egyptian Sixth Army. In the three weeks they had been dredging narrow
strips in the gulf, there had been few problems. The Egyptians were glad to be on leave
from the army and making a little extra spending money for their trips to Mama, a small
Egyptian resort several miles away. Still, Beck saw them as slackers, and he didn't trust
their swarthy skins, their fast Arabic, the way they seemed to always be fiddling around
but never quite fixing the excavation equipment.

"Can you imagine these camel jockeys
trying to move a column of heavy armor across the desert in a blitz?" Beck had
cracked earlier to Spelling. To Spelling Beck was a sort of hero-or at least a link with
the last heroic age. Beck had been with Patton and crossed the Sigried line into the heart
of Nazi Germany. He had done his time in the old Pershing tanks-"sluggish, but
dependable, heavily armored but profiled like a giant duck"

"Y'see, armored warfare," Beck
said, casting disparaging glances at the Egyptians, "required precision, discipline
and a cool head." Beck, indeed all of them including the Egyptian soldiers, well
remembered the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars, and all but Beck I had been dumbstruck to see
the endless rows of Egyptian tanks and half-tracks dismembered and cremated along the
military highway leading across the Sinai. Like Dante on the edge of the first ring, or
Isaiah in the Valley of Bones, they had not believed that death had undone so many.

Beck, Spelling, and the other Americans ate a
large breakfast together while the Arabs said their morning orisons, and bathed. They
discussed the ten tons of silt they had processed, and one of the junior members of the
group wondered if they weren't going about the dredging in the wrong way.

"Instead of criss-crossing the gulf with
the strips of shallow samples, wouldn't it be better to just go to the center of the gulf
and take one deep sample?"

Spelling's first response had been to remind
the seminary student that on his (Spellings) first dig in the Negev, he had been content
to learn as much as he could-by implication he meant to say "kept his mouth
shut."

But that was an interesting idea, Beck
conceded. "Yes, that was a brilliant observation." For a moment Beck looked at
the student as though he had seen him touched by God. "Of course, in three thousand
years there would be considerable movement of debris to the center of the gulf!"

The Pentateuch had numbered the fleeing
Israelites in the hundreds of thousands. Certainly Pharaoh would not have pursued such a
number-with less than a thousand or more chariots? All they would need to find was one
chariot or horse in livery, one charioteer anchored down with ancient armor. But they must
go deeper now, he realized, dig into the grave of so many followers of Pharaoh, into its
clay bottom, as this young fellow had suggested.

The day's light was heavy upon them now, and
they could feel the heat seeping up through the soles of their shoes. They knew their
duties. The students under the supervision of Spelling would begin their screening of the
previous day's barge load of mud. The divers would get their scuba gear and dredging
equipment into the launch that had been provided. Beck would speak to Mohammed Abdulhafid,
foreman of the Egyptian contingent.

"Straight down, Mr. Beck?" His
black hand motioned, circling down in the air like a drill.

"Yes, how far can you go?"

Mohammed scratched the side of his cheek and
watched a hawk circle overhead as he formulated his answer. "Not easy going down
dangerous too."

"Dangerous-nonsense."

'Mud slides underwater too."

He had heard everything now. "If you can't do it Beck
said finally, rolling up his surface map of the gulf.

"Oh, I did not say 'can't do,' but it's
dangerous and the divers will need to be persuaded." He meant more money, Beck
thought. Where was Spelling? He would have to sign for any overdraft.

"If money is a problem," Mohammed
asked jutting out his lower lip in a poor- man expression.

Beck wanted to sack them all on the spot. But
he needed them like he needed Spelling and his Free-will Baptists. A man of Becks
reputation should not have had to rely on the financing of the Baptist Union of Churches.
But everyone else-the respectable academic world-had respectfully ignored his proposal.
They did not appreciate the magnitude of his last quest. But what could they understand of
the sulking deity of Sinai on the fashionable North Shore of Chicago. Jehovah was just a habiru
god who had "done well for himself' as far as the higher critics were concerned,
and they traced the evolution of jehovah from local hunting totem to god of war, from
mighty lord of hosts to the benign scorekeeper of Christian thought. Beck himself had
taught this himself years before. Had Yahweh opened the Gulf of Suez-made dry twenty eight
miles of sea lane?

"Come, Dr. Beck, you must be kidding?" the Director
of Oriental Studies had asked him over the phone. Beck knew the arguments from both sides:
the undoubting literalists and the cynical grand masters of scientific seek-and-destroy.
He even knew the position of 'millions' on the subject, the pseudonewtonian theologians
who argued God by natural science.

"Quite possibly the volcano Thera had exploded sometime
in the fourteenth century BC, and the aftershock might momentarily have displaced large
bodies of water as far away as the Red Sea, coincidentally enough at the exact moment
(give or take a century) that the Israelites were fleeing from Pharoah's army," Beck
had said to the incredulous nonbeliever. Certainly all these probably's and might-have's
were no mere coincidence. "Deus ex volcano," he concluded simply and said
nothing to the higher critic about his new faith.

Finally Beck had had to swallow sand in seeking the backing
of religious fundamentalists. As he was fond of saying, 'When Science climbs that last
mountain, it might just find Religion sitting there all along." What else-not science
surely-could explain Beck's thirst after knowledge of the Highest Good? Science could not
explain the pain he felt. Even so, Beck did not suffer gladly the company of
religious zealots when they were also ignoramuses. Even so, one could be in the
right camp for many a wrong reason, and vice versa. Beck had been in both camps, but Beck
had never beer confused-never been an ignoramus. When the extremes met, a final push had
landed Beck where he had begun Beck had grown Immeasurably in going full circle. Even
so, as everyone knows, it was hard to share the true faith.

When Zina arrived, she found her father in
the middle of a small enclave ankle deep in water, excitedly examining a metal fragment
that had been caught in one of their larger filters which passed the mud samples on in
even smaller gradations.

"Hammy," she called from the edge
of the bank as she shimmied out of the shoulder straps of her backpack. Zina was in her
late twenties, and her face had sunk a little over the years, her youthful skin had lost
its softness. Beck had warned her that too much tanning would make it like leather, and in
truth, it had. But her figure was still sharp and sinewy, her legs athletic and well
oiled, No one noticed her as she drew off her desert boots and waded into the midst. She
wasn't Beck's only child. Still, he had doted on her as though she were and favored her
till she herself had begged him to stop. He had told her that she was more than the apple
of his eye-she was the tree and garden itself. He alone heard her voice as she tried to
squeeze in among the others.

"Hey, dammit!" she shouted finally,
trying to get in, and he lei drop to the pallet the molded metal fragment which tapered
to a dull point.

Beck called her name and reached through the
others to draw he in. He kissed and hugged her mightily, and over his shoulder she could
see everyone's eyes wild with excitement. This was a great moment. Someone should take
photos. There was some back slapping as Rev. Spelling now picked up the item of curiosity
and displayed it

"Gentlemen, I submit for your
consideration item lot number one Egyptian spearhead, circa 1450 BC, Mosaic period."
There were more selfcongratulations, more backslapping and splashing in the ruddy waters.
Zina pulled back and saw tears flooding her father's sad hollow eyes.

She kissed him on both cheeks like a French
general and declared, I 'Well Hammy, I bring you good luck, eh?"

That night he took her to the place on the
rocky mount above their camp. Hamilton had located the camp near this spot as this point
commanded a vista of the surrounding desert and gulf. Not far distant from this roundtop,
he had already shown her a burned-out rnissile launcher. But she hadn't marveled at it.
'What was it, a junk yard?" she asked, pointing at the missile trailer. To her it was
all bleak and useless.

Farther up he told her how Pharaohs, Romans,
Pashas, Nazis, and most recently, the Egyptian Army had obviously used this mount for
reconnaissance. "And perhaps Moses too," he told his daughter and thought she
gave him an indulgent if not a patronizing smile. "Perhaps-perhaps not," he
conceded. Then they sat cross-legged and quietly on the plateau for several moments and
gazed east over the shimmering gulf bordered on the far side by a short row of vague
purple cliffs.

"Ham," she said at last, leaning
close to him, perching her chin on his shoulder and giving him a peck on the ear. 'What is
it makes you chase these things?''

"You mean, I suppose, that I haven't
settled down like you have to a life of vagabonding." He still had not forgiven her
for having left Smith College before taking her degree. "You were only 12 credits
short," he wanted to say again, as he had said on numerous occasions, but he didn't
remembering other arguments and injuries.

"Hammy, I do think I'm going to settle
down-going to get married."

"Oh? When?"

"As soon as the dig here is over, I
suppose. I want you to give me away."

He tried for a moment to picture the wedding,
his standing next to his daughter, the look on his face when he saw again his former wife.
But somehow the picture was impossible. "You must be kidding!" he replied. She
shook her head. He knew that he would not attend his daughter's wedding, for some reason
which seemed akin to the psychic-he couldn't imagine why, he sensed it like a band
tightening about his heart. He turned away from the vision in his mind and back to her. It
hurt him a bit to have to ask "her." 'Does she, your mother, know?"

"Of course-she's so excited. I left her
all the arrangements flowers, dresses, bridesmaids, reception. I have to make sure of only
one thing .... ',

Beck swallowed more sand and was alarmed
almost to see a meteorite flare-out in the infinite space just above his daughter's
forehead, as though it would have landed like a cinder in her curly red hair. Another
portent? He no longer discounted anything.

His colleagues had always remarked on how, as
a child, she alone took after him, the short straight nose and small flaring nostrils, the
low curly hair line and thick eyebrows. But now, especially in the dim light of the moon,
he could see his wife's imprint clearly on his first-born as she spoke and gestured, and
he was almost moved to interrupt, to confess his insane lovesickness, to share the
inexpressible with her.

"And how is she-your mother?" he
said in a low careful monotone.

"Mom? Oh, fine. She sends her love-if
you know what I mean. She'll be impressed to hear about your finding."

He forced a smile and squeezed her right
shoulder. "Today's finding? You mustn't mention that it's nothing.

Despite the hoopla, Beck had not been
impressed with the spearhead from the moment he had seen it. It was grimy and corroded,
but it had not been of the right stuff-bronze, brass, or primitive iron. It was an alloy,
like black steel or tungsten. Not old enough by a long way, he thought.

Spelling, however, had begged to differ. It
was clearly a spearhead, and he intended to display it at the seminary as such. Hamilton
did not doubt it. One of the Egyptians figured it later for what it was, to the amusement
of the other Arabs: a detonating tip for an old floating sea-mine.

Beck had not explained to his daughter the
rules of the dig. She was an unregenerate flower-child, a ripened dandelion dissipating in
the whirlwind. Hitchhiking, nude bathing, and traveling with strangers were her mainstays
as she criss-crossed the old and new world. He had noticed Jerusha's sidelong glance,
scrutinizing his Zina's braless look at dinner that first evening. In the morning she had
gone to bathe and, knowing nothing of the Moslem customs, she had, simply by her
bikini-clad presence, driven the scantily dad Egyptians from the water.

"You can't bathe while the men are
bathing he explained later.

"I wasn't bathing but going for a
swim," she said.

"Nevertheless, they were."

"Bathing? They were all wearing
speedos!"

"Yes, they bathe like that."

"They bathe in speedos?" she asked
in grinning amazement.

"A good Moslem is never naked in public,
some are never naked-in public or otherwise."

"Otherwise? What's their problem?"
Beck understood about their world. He would have told her about the genie who sat upon
their shoulders and recorded their deeds, both good and bad. But there was no telling when
she would turn her scorn at their superstitions on him and his. Still he loved to see her
eyes sparkle when she thought she was on to something or otherwise teasing God about his
rules.

'What about when they have sex?"

Beck smiled and threw his hands up in
exasperation like an Old Testament prophet. He blamed himself. He had raised her without
religion during his own period of doubt. His free thinking had resulted in her
irreverence. It had been like this with both his wives. But his intellectual liberation
had really only been a truancy. He had cut himself off from all religious dogma, told
himself man was the center of the universe. He had broken the bonds and speculated on
things beyond the veil. His mind had seemed irreverently unbounded, but looking down,
years later, his smugness had turned to bitterness and he saw hairline fissures in his
feet of day. Perhaps this is what frightened him most-not ordinary death, he had seen that
many times at the age of twenty as a tank commander. Something more than death rattled him
now-not losing his life, but having lost at life swallowed him in panic.

Close to an entire week was lost while the
diving crew reequipped themselves for the new task of going vertical into the gulf floor.
And with only two weeks left to their excavation permit, Spelling became increasingly
agitated and obnoxious. He began to express misgivings about their goals. He would need to
explain this to the church. Wasn't certainty an enemy of faith? he asked. Would God allow
his book to be proven? And he dogged Beck. He would ask 'What exactly do you have planned
for today?" knowing full well the schedule. Yes, he had made three significant
discoveries, but Beck wasn't a magician; he didn't pull rabbits out of his hat. Beck
thought that perhaps it had been Spellings initial embarrassment about the
mis-identification of the sea-mine device that had turned his attitude against Beck and
his handling of the dig. Or perhaps it was the business of Zina's bathing with the divers
that bothered him. There was no telling. Now Spelling was on Hamilton to have his daughter
dive with the Egyptians or else what was she here for?

"She can tell us whether they are really working down
there or just ...."

"You want my daughter to spy on the
divers, then?" he interrupted.

"Wouldn't you like to know what is
really going on down there? We see a trail of bubbles and get a ton of shit and that's all
we know. Besides, Hamilton, she wants to dive!"

Beck, too, had been uneasy about trusting
such a crucial part of the operation to the Egyptians. The possibility of the entire crew
being controlled by the Ministry of Archaeology concerned him now. They might be sitting
on top of the biggest discovery of the last skeptical century, waiting for his digging
permit to run out so that an Egyptian archaeologist could come in and make the discovery.
He imagined the divers swimming among the gleaming chariots, stripping the armor from
ancient ancestral skeletons, making neat little golden Beck had no intention of letting her
dive. That night he borrowed piles while a nearby drill and vacuum churned on
unattended.

Beck had no intention of letting her dive.
That night he borrowed one of the jeeps and took Zina into Mama for conscious at a cafe
Chat served as an officers! club for the nearby American detachment. Zina wore her only
dress, an Indian wrap-around skirt or sarong of sheer pleated cotton and a bare-midriff
blouse embroidered with exotic birds of paradise.

"Hey pop, who's your sugar?" one of
the GI's at the bar had cracked as they entered-somewhat under his breath, but Hamilton
had heard it. He squared his shoulders and glared back. Hell, he wouldn't take that, he
thought, but felt undermined the moment he looked round and caught Zina smiling and
trading a wink with the stranger.

"He's just a boy, Dad," she said
easily.

Hamilton had been in the service-he knew what
he was. 'Don't let me get in the way if you want to join him," he replied curtly. Why
was she taking the soldier's side against him?

She read his brows and answered back.
"You never have gotten in the way, Hammy, and that's why I love you." Zina.
always found a way of making him feel all right about his stuffiness. She leaned across
the table, kissing him long and fully on the mouth. She was not easily offended, was in
fact too easy with her forgiveness. No sense of the appropriate, of the just. Had she
created mankind, she had told him once, it would not have been from dust or clay, but
goose down and rose petals. More teasing, he thought. Now she would probably tell him that
original sin would not have been grounds for eviction from the Garden. Beck looked again
at the bronze Marine with two chevrons. He softened. He realized that the soldier was no
threat and certainly no rival. How silly he had been, he thought, and tilted in the
opposite direction. Why shouldn't a soldier notice an attractive girl? He asked whether he
shouldn't go over and invite the young American to join them for a drink-a fellow American
after all.

"Maybe later," she said and put her
hand in his. "For an after dinner drink-if he's still there, that is, and if this
wine makes me forget I'm engaged."

Arab waiters in white pajamas served a large
terrine of stew and rice, and Beek said he enjoyed this meal more than any he could
remember.

"C'mon, Dad, surely one of your dinners
on one of your many honeymoons," she mused and thus opened the door to the topic that
he generally refused to think about.

"I don't remember those moments,"
he confessed curtly. What moments did he remember? The opening of Philip's tomb-the first
moment he had shined the incandescent lamps down into the beehive-vaulted tomb of
Alexander's father. He had felt like a hero and burglar at the same time, a Hermes
transgressing the underworld with impunity. And there had been the time he rappelled by
rope down the side of Masada, attached like a spider over a chasm, and discovered the
bat-infested cave that yielded up the Temple Scroll. Nothing is ever really lost, and
somehow he felt a part of this history. He felt as though he had come on the heels of
great events. The last man to have set foot in this tomb was no doubt the grieving
Alexander. The last person to touch this scroll, to roll it up and hide it in a clay jar,
had been some rebel priest moments before his own suicide. He sensed the timeless pathos
of this history now and then as he stood on the bluff and looked out over the gulf. As for
the marriages, he must have blocked them out.

"But tell me, Zina, you must have talked
to your mother about our marriage." He settled his eyes heavily on her, but his heart
skittered like a pigeon. "My did she really leave? You must know."

Zina only leaned her head on one palm and
looked so sorrowful that he thought for a moment they would cry together. "Did she
have so little respect for me that she could just he said swallowing the last words.

"Oh Hammy, there's no one that respects
or admires you more. She's told me a thousand times what a brilliant mind you have."

'Why then? It was the religion then?" He
held on to his emotions and pressed her again. He felt an ominous urgency to pursue this
issue. Who could tell when if ever he would have the chance to speak with her again so
frankly? He felt for a moment as though he were on the heels of something, as though he
were about to break a plaster seal into a tomb-perhaps his own.

She would not look him in the eye now. She
looked down upon the table, at the soiled cloth and half-finished plates of food. She
dipped her fingers into her water glass and swirled the ice. After a moment he concluded
she had no intention of telling him now or ever. He wasn't asking for a miracle, a
restitution of all things; all he wanted was an answer to his question. It was wrong of
her to keep the secret from him. But right or wrong, women stick together in these things.
As much as he loved Zina, her femaleness, her perfidy set his heart with evil fire.

He summoned up now a stronger, more objective
voice from deep in his gut. "I always tried to do what's right," he confessed.
"Maybe that's boxing to some people, but. ..."

"Dad, you said the other day that man does not live by
bread alone." He didn't remember, but it was the sort of thing he actually found
himself saying now and again. 'When you said that, I thought, 'No, not by bread, not even
by the word of God, but with I something else.' Don't you see? Even I have to wonder
sometimes, if there is any room in that mind of ciphers for anything else." Her eyes
were pleading, but her biblical allusion had offended him. After the way she lived, she
had no right to quote from the Bible.

Besides, he knew all this; what's more he had never pretended
to be anything but what he was. If she had wanted a frivolous man....

'Would you like to know what Mom said when I told her you
were I trying to prove that God had parted the Red Sea? She said, Well, if that makes him
happy."'

"Not the Red Sea, Zina," he lectured irritably.
"The Red Sea is 'at one point 287 miles wide and 7,000 feet deep. But the Reed Sea,
as it was anciently called, that is another thing entirely; that is a real possibility,
being shallow and less than fourteen miles across at one point." God could perform
this lesser sort of miracle, he argued.

"I scarcely think Mother will appreciate the
difference," she said uncomfortably, leaning back, wrapping herself with her arms.

"Yes, well, there you have it," he shot back and
grabbed the corners of the table. He well understood the difference between the two
miracles. "How could I love a woman who couldn't possibly understand the difference
between parting the Red Sea and the Reed Sea, let alone the importance of the discovery
that I am trying to make? Zina, you realize--don't you? If Pharaoh;s chariots are at the
bottom of that gulf, you see what that means?"

"Dad, you haven't even asked the name of the man I am
going to marry."

"Yes," he said in momentary confusion, "I'm
sorry." But he did not intend to let her change the subject. "Did she ,m or did
she not realize the importance of this discovery?"

She folded her napkin into a simple hat and put it on her
plate. "I guess it means the fun's over--that I'd better mend my ways and become a
serious character." Wasn't happy to hear that she was finally getting
married--becoming an honest woman? Why couldn't they have a pleasant dinner and talk about
her engagement and the man she was to marry?

This had nothing to do with her; this excavation had to do
with God, he told her. If the chariots are there, it's because God trapped them there! He
exists. That is the important thing. Chasing after the Great I AM is no frivolous or empty
pursuit after hap-pee-ness! he said, mocking the whole concept.

"Let's forget God for a minute," she said finally,
coolly, impudently. "Let's talk about reality."

That didn't make any sense to him. She was just smarting off.
No, she was absolutely serious, she said. He was stunned by her admission. Doubt--that was
reasonable--even necessary for faith, but absolute defiance of God, even if he didn't
exist--that was an entirely different thing. His mind was spinning, and he thought that
she had to at least hope God was there. What kind of world did she live in? He wanted to
know.

"The chariots-you don't even hope they're there, do
you?"

She shook her head. If this wasn't important, he had no idea
what was. Angry and overheated, he wiped his face with the napkin and demanded to know.
'Then why in the hell did you come all this way--just to dive?"

In the morning she apologized off-handedly,
and he said he had already forgotten it. Then he told himself that he didn't care what she
did-dive or not-and he took little interest in her the two days she worked with the other
divers, checking out shoddy aqualung gear, goofing around with and flattering the Arabs
while she acquainted herself with the underwater mining procedure. They would be diving to
more than 200 feet. She had never been down more than eighty.

He despaired. How could any discovery be made
with such a group? Spelling was just a rabid fanatic who Beck could see was only
interested in hawking Egyptian artifacts in lecture tours from one end of the Bible Belt
to the other. And, of course, there were the Egyptians, illiterate, superstitious, and
lazy in this as well; not one of them had been to Mecca to press his lips to the holy
meteor that Allah had given to Mohammed. Why, they were no better 0~ the charioteers of
Pharaoh and his false god. And last of all, there was Hamilton Beck, the higher critic
turned agnostic, reborn Christian.

"0 Lord, 1 am not worthy," he
prayed again from atop his stone redoubt. Down in the gulf he watched momentarily and then
turned away as the divers prepared to descend. Zina, like the Egyptians, pressed her mask
securely to her face and fell backwards, head first and feet up, off the skirt of the
launch and sank unnoticed into the sea.